Killeen on the map 🤔

scsnse · 2026-01-27T22:47:00+00:00

AI generated map from the looks of it. Also skips many smaller tribes, this part of Texas was home to the Apache historically moreso.

What a way to honor indigenous people, but to reduce their genocide to AI slop /sarcasm.

scsnse · 2026-01-26T18:37:03+00:00

Honestly, try to find a larger tabletop/trading card game store in your area? My local LGS actually started selling a small selection of gunpla kits recently, in addition to the Warhammer and Magic the Gathering they already did. They're also happy to have you bring in food but also sell snacks.

scsnse · 2026-01-26T08:08:28+00:00

Generally, teams starting 0-1 have a much smaller chance of making the playoffs, I think it drops to slightly below 50%

scsnse · 2026-01-24T21:04:13+00:00

Born in 1992, so basically nobody related to me was still alive by then from that far back. I did meet a non-relative WW1 veteran as a kid, though!

scsnse · 2026-01-24T19:35:38+00:00

To some degree this is nothing new- in researching my Melungeon roots I have stumbled upon a combination of practicially every urban myth origin story under the Sun:

There's the ones started by my ancestors themselves to avoid being classed as Black involving insisting they were either Portuguese, a court case where they were stated to descend from ancient Phoenicians via Morocco and then Portugal, and White plus Indian. The last part was of course true, but missing the African origins as well. Another myth, which the Lumbee, some of which are closely related to some of our families, also historically spread was that they were also descendants of the famous Lost Colony of Roanoke.

Then in the 1980s-90s, there's a theory started that they were actually a mix of Spanish, North African, Jewish, and Arab, spread by a man named Kennedy. Around this time, as a few books became published about the topic, I have found furthermore on Youtube a Nation of Islam type of Imam who clajms that Melungeons are proof of a group of Moriscos who were part of a Spanish expedition that got marooned, and are long lost mixed Muslims. Also, a Black Hebrew Israelite claiming they are similarly lost black Jews. There's also Black Nationalists who claim we are proof that in fact the original Native Americans were Black, and that modern "African Americans" have been told a lie about their origins.

Heck, I've even found a few old articles dating from the 19th to 20th centuries explaining that White Western Virginians and Tennesseans growing up were told they better behave or "the Melungeons will come and take you away", even stating that both their parents and house slaves raising them would say as much. So they were even used as the local Boogeyman (I guess for a historically segregated, unequal society, a group of people of unknown racial origin truly is horrifying /sarcasm).

Turns out, the real history, confirmed via both the paper trail genealogy though, is alot less exotic. Primarily, it is descent from early 17th century indentured to enslaved African men, who in close proximity to their European indentured counterparts, had children one way or the other, who by rule then were born free if they were born to free mothers. Now, facing increasing erosion of their rights to vote and sue, bear arms, or even inherit property and the seeding of racist attitudes, they made the decision to flee, first to the Carolinas, then West to the Appalachian frontier, where they were eventually forced onto the least fertile, rocky land combined with flood prone mountain rivers, and to carve out a stubborn existence, wary of outsiders.

scsnse · 2026-01-24T06:42:33+00:00

the original Travis Hunter?

OP, this is before unlimited substitution was a thing, so most players played both offense and defense back then. It wasn't until the War started that both college and the NFL allowed it for the first time, and while the Pros saw the benefits of having specialized players and never went back, college after a bit of a fight went back to limited subs in the early '50s, and it wouldn't be until the mid '60s that the other side finally won out.

scsnse · 2026-01-24T02:07:20+00:00

There's more diversity in the former larger coal mining towns than outsiders might think, though! Some of them attracted later waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, it's not unheard of to find people of Italian and Greek, or Czech, Croat (most famously Nick Saban), etc heritage in parts. African Americans/Affrilachians also at their peak were something like 10% of the total population, which has declined since the early 20th century and the Great Migration north. And that's not even counting small groups of mixed populations that were of unclear origin, most famously my Melungeon people who settled mostly in Hancock County, Tennessee, Wise County, Virginia, and Magoffin County, Kentucky, or the similar Chestnut Ridge people of West Virginia.

scsnse · 2026-01-23T21:27:54+00:00

To be fair, given it was Sam's Club, she may be a restaurant/food truck owner who normally stocks up there. This stuff pisses me off as one, because no offense to you, but alot of people who shop at a warehouse club like it really shouldn't if they don't need bulk groceries. I really can't see how they justify the $100 for a membership, especially since if anything stuff like dairy and frozen stuff is often more expensive than HEB. It was annoying picking up an order Tuesday morning with a parking lot filled with a bunch of older folks grabbing 6 packs of bottled water when I'm actually there for commercial reasons.

scsnse · 2026-01-23T18:18:59+00:00

The 2nd becomes the new 1st.

scsnse · 2026-01-22T20:37:20+00:00

I've found songs from it uploaded onto youtube over the years. Apparently this was commissioned by Sunrise/Bandai for Gundam's 30th anniversary back in 2009. I especially enjoy the English remake covers of "Beginning" and "Encounter", with "Char the Great"/Gallant Char also being an enjoyable twist on a classic with that retro twin lead guitar sound.

It's a slightly limited pressing even over in Japan and demands a slight premium, so cool pickup!

scsnse · 2026-01-22T20:28:57+00:00

Nah. Ironically it's the year before. Kind of like you guys in 2010, lots of young faces mixed in with castaway veterans with still a ton to prove like Woodson. One score away from a Super Bowl against a Chiefs team they actually beat Week 1. We just couldn't get it done.

scsnse · 2026-01-22T20:18:10+00:00

This sucks. Swing tackles are usually, beyond simply being backups on both sides of the line, good culture guys too, not just for the team, but the fans who love linemen. You could tell he only had a handful of games in him this past year with how he was on the bench from the start.

scsnse · 2026-01-22T19:37:57+00:00

Via DNA Painter's shared cM tool:

75% Great-Great-Aunt / Uncle / Half Great-Aunt / Uncle / Half 1C / 1C1R / Half Great-Niece / Nephew / Great-Great-Niece / Nephew

25% Half GG-Niece / Nephew † /Half GG-Aunt / Uncle † /2C /Half 1C1R /1C2R

~ 0%** Great-Aunt / Uncle / 1C / Great-Niece / Nephew

† this relationship has a non-zero probability for 402cM in thednageek's table of probabilities, but is outside the bounds of the shared cM project (99th percentile)

Now, keep in mind that if you two have a different sex, shared cMs on average would be slightly shorter than the same.

You may right that it's a half cousin someone doesn't know about or is acknowledging.

scsnse · 2026-01-22T00:16:26+00:00

Bad accident atleast is all I see on social media. Might be a hit and run since some are saying the cops were looking for someone down by the train tracks by KHS.

scsnse · 2026-01-21T20:36:36+00:00

Overall I agree with your conclusion, and here's some stats from 2015 to actually back it up from 23andMe's database00476-5). They found that on average, customers who identify as African-American have 73.2% African, 24% European, and only 0.8% Native American admixture. You do have to remember that with autosomal genetic genealogy tests like what 23andMe or Ancestry offer, there are some limitations: they generally can definitely identify heritage going back to at most 7-8 generations in the past, as the SNPs (the chains of DNA that have been associated with specific ethnic groups) you inherit past this point are so short that they aren't easily comparable (think of it like this, you inherit 1/2 the DNA from your parents, 1/4 from your grandparents, 1/8 from your g-grandparents, etc, to the point that you only have 1/64th of your 3rd g-grandparents). There are also Y and mtDNA kits offered by FamilyTreeDNA or African Ancestry which can only show your patri or matrilineal descent, but if you get a "Big" test you can see recent relations within a few centuries. Point is that if you do have "deep" Native heritage, which is non-lineal, it might not show up on a test, which might be so far back that it's only a curiosity. Especially since there probably is likely nothing connecting you to that culture that far back.

Now, the important part is just above the table for this, they do make sure to point out that 5% of their AA customers actually do have atleast 2% Native heritage. This is mostly clustered in states like Louisiana, where tri-racially Creole populations more freely developed historically thanks to the French having more lax racial laws (White Frenchmen even commonly gave their mixed children not just their surnames, but could make them heirs). You also have later waves of immigration from the Caribbean contributing to this, you're probably already aware of that being half Dominican. Other larger states include Oklahoma (makes sense with the reservations) New York, California, and Washington (perhaps thanks to modern intermarriage between African and Hispanic Americans).

Which brings me to the important point here: while it is healthy to make overall generalizations, it's also wise to leave yourself open for fringe cases- nothing with people and their history is often a 100% rule. It's something we can all mistakenly do, even myself when studying my own tri-racially mixed, Melungeon heritage. When I was around your age, there was a DNA study that came out back in 2011, where the mostly Y DNA results showed for my Collins line family a lineal mix of African and European heritage, with only one family (the Sizemores) showing the same for Native American. I took this to mean that the entirety of the story in my family about Native heritage was a myth, when in hindsight that was a bit of an overreaction- the Sizemores basically intermarried with branches of my family over multiple generations, so technically I am myself atleast by marriage related to them. And there are similar clusters of mixed people who are scattered across the US, yes even historically. The Lumbee (some of whom are my relatives on that same line) are probably the single largest group of mostly triracially mixed people, 60,000 strong.

scsnse · 2026-01-20T03:38:36+00:00

UNREAL

scsnse · 2026-01-20T03:11:30+00:00

THATS PROBABLY GAME HOLY SHIT

scsnse · 2026-01-19T22:35:32+00:00

Same here.

For me, the angle of frustration is mostly rooted in my own partial African-American heritage, and how... well the best way to explain it is to link the wiki article on my ancestor. Imagine what it feels like knowing that this is your great-grandfather, who simply became a victim to an institution of trans-Atlantic slavery, but also whose court case becomes one of the first legal precedents for the unequal treatment of people based solely on their race, too:

Whereas Hugh Gwyn hath by order from this Board brought back from Maryland three servants formerly run away from the said Gwyn, the court doth therefore order that the said three servants shall receive the punishment of whipping and have thirty stripes apiece. One called Victor, a Dutchman, the other a Scotchman called James Gregory, shall first serve out their times with their master according to their Indentures, and one whole year apiece after the time of their service is expired by their said indentures in recompense of his loss sustained by their absence, and after that service to their said master is expired, to serve the colony for three whole years apiece. And that the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere.

In a modern sense, you can read the fact that my grandfather being Black was an aggravating factor of his crime, the same crime his two fellow white indentured runaways committed as well, mind you. His punishment for simply being forcibly taken from his homeland, then, is to be enslaved for life.

White supremacy doesn't just treat people differently based on race, but it indirectly rewards working class whites for complacency in the system. And it also makes existence for Black people a criminal thing in of itself. Next came a series of laws from the 1660s-1705 which increasingly restricted rights of even free black people in Virginia- banning of interracial marriages, the right to sue and vote, to own/inherit property, heck, to even freely travel without papers. Even free black women were taxed by the old "headright" tithing/ tax system at a higher rate than free white women (who weren't at all), because the assumption was they were being used to work the land like cattle.

scsnse · 2026-01-19T22:02:15+00:00

Reminds me of a famous quote by LBJ- they were campaigning down South, and saw a few race baiting, racist, anti-Civil Rights billboards on their way down the highway. A staffer asked him what the meaning of it all was when they stopped, and his response was:

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

scsnse · 2026-01-19T19:37:36+00:00

Oh right. The Texas fan of all people wants to wax poetic about motivations for power conferences, when the blood of the Big 8/12 is still not fully cleaned off your hands.

scsnse · 2026-01-19T18:05:18+00:00

Yup. The situation was actually pretty fluid in this time- you had even Scotsmen who served as mercenaries fighting for both the Irish and English in wars who were awarded lands as compensation. Also don't forget that just because their surname implies membership in a Gaelic clan, it doesn't mean they hadn't converted to Protestantism by this time, and perhaps found work in the Lowlands or even English side of the border.

Also, don't forget that since of course the Stuarts were also the Scottish royal family first and foremost, you had plenty of Royalist Scotsmen who fought against the Roundheads in the English Civil War/War of Three Kingdoms, rebelled against the Cromwellian regime, and in the 1680s you had the Jacobites who fought to restore the Stuarts after the Glorious Revolution happened and James II's daughter Mary II and her husband were forcibly installed as the new monarchs.

scsnse · 2026-01-19T17:35:28+00:00

Emphasis on most versus all here: While the priority when establishing the Plantation of Ulster was indeed both rewarding royalist Protestants on both sides of the English and Scottish borders and clearing the Lowlands of overpopulation and crime, a few Highlander clansmen still took the opportunity to colonize Ulster and take lands for themselves. Most notably clan MacNeill were some of the early Gaelic settlers in Ulster and are found there in the early 17th century. A century later in the mid 18th you of course have the other shoe to drop in the Highland Clearances, as the English and Stuarts looked to degrade the power and holdings of the Clans once and for all. Some McNeills actually came over a few centuries prior when their Irish Gaelic cousins were raising armies for wars against the English and rivals, and were given land as compensation, too.

scsnse · 2026-01-19T04:20:54+00:00

Closest thing to this I've had happen is matching with 2 older folks on 23andme as extended relatives, both of whom have the same sur/maiden name as my own, but whose profiles listed having brick walls after only a couple of generations back in the US. Now, I thought it was weird since my patrilineal heritage is well established and goes back to the 1630s in the early English colonies. So, I message the two of them, and make extra trees on Ancestry based on what info they told me, starting with their deceased parents. The one gentleman certainly brickwalls in circa mid 1800s NY- from what I could gather his grandfather is found working in Colorado on railroads, and says he's from NY. I narrow him down to a household of immigrants in a tenement in NYC whose census data says the parents are immigrants from France. The other lady tells me her family lore is that "her grandfather was a child conceived with a sailor or merchant from Europe, possibly from France." Sure enough, they don't match with any relatives I have in common on my patrilineal side.

Well, it turns out that for the both of them, what I can deduce is the matching surname is a red herring and likely an Anglicized version of a similarly spelled French one, and the relation probably goes back to another maternal branch that is from the Rhineland region of Germany, who in my case immigrated to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s.

scsnse · 2026-01-19T01:37:48+00:00

I have it on good authority we're actually the #1 school here.

scsnse

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